


Cuckoos

by Zaniida



Series: MCU Oneshots [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Additional Tags May Apply, Capture, Cryptic Loki, Gen, Hard-of-hearing Clint Barton, I'm kinda too tired to tag right, Possibly Ableist Language, Tracking, Unethical Experimentation (offscreen)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:14:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21982744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: When Loki busts free from one of SHIELD's prisons, Clint tracks him down and sees him safely returned.  But Loki's cryptic words keep rattling around in Clint's brain....
Series: MCU Oneshots [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1490792
Comments: 13
Kudos: 74





	Cuckoos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crazy_Cat_Lady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazy_Cat_Lady/gifts), [FoxxiMcLeod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxxiMcLeod/gifts), [Rabentochter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabentochter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Something Shattered](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8825461) by [Thoughtstream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thoughtstream/pseuds/Thoughtstream). 



> It's the Twelve Days of Christmas, Day Two, so this is the second **Gift Fic** of the year.
> 
> Thank you to Crazy_Cat_Lady and Rabentochter for reading my work, and FoxxiMcLeod for leaving memorable comments on a certain other fic that we're both enjoying.
> 
> (Foxxi, it's late and I'm tired, so forgive me if I forget if you've ever crossed my fics before, but the comments section for DFD is one of my favorite places right now, and I've enjoyed reading what you have to say. Plus, my other note about you is "could use encouragement for her writing," so have a very tired Zaniida's "Hope this encourages you!" along with the offer of a beta read for any one project under 10,000 words. Or a brainstorming session, if you'd prefer.)
> 
> This is the "light Lokiwhump" fic; there may be a darker fic coming out during this stretch (I'm hoping to publish one short fic per day, but, as we've seen, I'm horrible at predicting my own productivity). I suppose "whump" might be inaccurate; Loki gets hurt and captured and worse, but there's no comfort here, except in the fact that some of the Avengers get the idea to look into his captivity, which might lead to his benefit in the future.
> 
> Initially, I had meant this to be a one-shot with possibly two chapters, and it wasn't likely to be written any time soon. But, as I was organizing my Gift Fic ideas, I realized that this fit one of the desired fic parameters. So I put this together kinda fast, and it's not entirely up to my standards (the second half, in particular, feels like a rough draft compared to my norm), but I figured it was better to get it up and out there than to keep messing with it. If I ever get around to writing the second part for this, I might at that point try to rewrite the conversation between Clint and Natasha. But, for the moment, this is a Hiatus Fic: It could lead to a fuller fic, but it's lowest priority because it could stop where it is and feel sorta complete.
> 
> As the tag says, I'm kinda too tired to tag right, so if you notice anything that ought to be tagged, please point it out! Trigger/content warnings or "hey, people who love X would want to read this" category tags or whatever. Thanks!

Loki’s escape had been inevitable; even Fury had known that. But the higher-ups at SHIELD had thought their countermeasures unbreachable, and nothing that Fury, Clint, or Natasha had said could sway them.

Hence why Loki—a _frost giant_ —had been held in a base surrounded by snow instead of, oh, desert or a humid rainforest or miles of ocean.

Clint’s preference had been Death Valley, but it’s not like he’d gotten a vote.

So now he was trudging through the snow in Norway, glad that he’d picked up exactly the right kind of boots: warm, dry feet and proper traction, even on the ice.

Because all Clint could focus on was hunting the monster down and putting a couple of arrows in his back.

Not the deadly kind, much as he would have liked to. SHIELD wanted info on how to contain an Asgardian, and, as it happened, they had only the one test subject. A couple of Clint’s arrows were tipped with tranquilizers, the best they’d come up with so far: eighteen minutes, which was way too long to be practical, given how deadly Loki could be in eighteen _seconds_. But it was what they had.

Clint would have preferred to get rid of the threat for good, but he had to admit that he got a dark thrill at the thought of Loki strapped down to a table somewhere, helpless and afraid, while the scientists pumped painful substances into his veins in an attempt to learn how to hurt, incapacitate, or control him. And if SHIELD could actually find a way to turn Loki’s powers to their side, well… it’s not like Clint would ever _trust_ him, but he could still be an asset, once they broke him. And if Asgard expected them to handle its messes, this was really the only way it was going to play out: Loki dead, or Loki as a dead-eyed soldier they could send in when the situation got too dangerous for their regular agents.

Eighteen seconds. About how long it had taken Loki to incapacitate an entire room of SHIELD agents. Undeniably useful, if he could be brought to heel, and that wasn’t even counting the magic.

So Clint tolerated their experiments, and had been glad to be assigned to the security forces ensuring that Loki wouldn’t escape and that nobody could get in to set him free. Oddly enough, being there helped him sleep better at night.

But he’d just returned from his patrol to find a bloodbath—dozens of good men down, and the doors wide open, the tracks leading out into the frozen woods. The nearest backup was hours away by air, which left Clint as the only person capable of bringing Loki back in.

He wasn’t about to let the monster slip away.

It was edging on twilight when he crested a hill and spotted Loki at the far end of a little valley, plowing through drifts as high as his knees. Aside from the crunch of Loki’s heavy footsteps, and occasional snowfall from the branches, it was deathly quiet, the snow masking all sound.

The clear shot was now; Clint barely stopped to draw breath as he took aim and let fly.

Loki’s knee buckled when the arrow struck, and he bit off a cry, stumbling down into the snowbank. As Loki grasped at a nearby tree to pull himself up, Clint’s next arrow hit him straight between the shoulder blades. It didn’t go in very far; that one was the tranq.

Now the trick was keeping an eye on Loki long enough for the drugs to kick in.

The erstwhile prince was still clinging to the tree, breathing heavily, when Clint got close enough to be wary of throwing knives—but Loki, though clearly aware of his presence, didn’t even turn around.

“Did you really think you’d get that far?” Clint asked roughly, keeping his distance for the moment. “SHIELD’s not gonna let you go so easily.”

The weakness and pain in Loki’s laugh didn’t mask his despairing amusement. “‘SHIELD’,” he breathed. “You missed it. Oh, you _missed_ it.”

“Pretty sure I didn’t,” Clint returned. It had taken him three or four minutes to cross the little valley, which left fourteen or fifteen minutes before Clint could trust that Loki was down. And only four or five before the drugs would start to kick in, letting Loki know that he was about to go under. The point at which he’d become _truly_ dangerous.

But orders were orders, and Clint valued his job more than he hated Loki. Which meant avoiding lethal force… for now.

“All the cuckoos in the nest,” Loki continued, leaving Clint to wonder if he’d misheard; it was always harder to make out words when he couldn’t see the face as well, the lips. (“Just turn up your hearing aids,” more than a few of his fellow agents had advised him, as if hearing aids were some sort of obvious superpower. So far, he hadn’t strangled any of them, but he’d given up trying to explain the problem with their ‘solution’.)

After a moment of silence between them—just the snowfall, and Loki’s wet and labored breaths—Clint finally echoed, “Cuckoos?”

“SHIELD’s full of them,” Loki said, “and you don’t even see, my little hawk-eyed—”

“Not yours,” Clint snapped. “Not anymore. Not ever again.”

Loki’s laugh prompted a round of coughing; he clung to the tree until finally he could catch his breath again.

Turning back to look at Clint, Loki ignored the arrow aimed at his chest, and grinned. “No. You’re not… not mine. You’re serving _them_ , now. And you don’t even know it; you don’t _see_. All the cuckoos in the nest. Dark hearts… many heads.”

Briefly, Clint considered if the drugs were kicking in early, and if the mixture they’d given him had some sort of mind-addling formula on top of the knockout. More likely, it was the remnants of whatever they’d done to Loki while he’d been in custody; he might’ve been high as a swallow-tail when he’d found his way out of the facility.

No matter. If Loki was spouting crazy talk, he wasn’t attacking, and Clint could put up with any amount of bullshit if it meant he’d be taking Loki in again, bound and helpless for another round of tests.

“They want me,” Loki said, his body dipping low, like he’d lost the strength to keep it upright. “Just like Odin. I’m just another stolen relic for everyone to make use of.”

“You expect sympathy from the guy you turned into a puppet?” Clint swapped his arrow for a second knockout arrow, and fired it, expecting Loki to snatch it out of the air like he had during the invasion; it wasn’t like he didn’t see it coming. But the arrow struck right under Loki’s ribs, and Loki curled in on himself, letting go of the tree and groaning as he sank to his knees in the snow.

Two doses… that would…

Actually, Clint wasn’t sure what a double dose would do. It wouldn’t knock Loki out any faster, or they’d have outfitted him with the larger dose to begin with. Maybe it kept him out longer, or brought him nearer to death; Clint didn’t even care. Anything to shut the jerk up before he got Clint mad enough to actually try to kill him.

He _wanted_ this job. Despite the annoyances. It was one of the few things he’d been good at in his life, and he wasn’t going to let it go. Not for _Loki_.

“They’re going to take me,” Loki murmured, so low that it barely registered. “They know enough… they’ve figured me out, and I c-can’t… can’t fight it off forever.”

“Yeah, you keep killing good men and we’ll keep finding more. Insects are like that.”

“Insects,” Loki echoed, and laughed again. He grasped the arrow and yanked it out—Clint tensed, ready to dodge, but Loki merely tossed it to the side. “Insects aren’t the only things that keep coming back. And you haven’t spotted them. I knew you were deaf, archer, but I never thought you were _blind_.”

After that, he fell silent, except for his shuddery breaths.

Clint kept an arrow trained on him for the few minutes it took before Loki’s eyes fell closed, and then the few more before he finally collapsed into the snow.

Twelve or thirteen minutes, maybe, since he’d hit him with the first dose. Not enough to be safe. Not enough to be _sure_.

If Clint drew close enough for Loki to kill him, then Loki would still pass out in five minutes or so. Assuming that frost giants couldn’t freeze to death in the snow, he’d be on his feet again in as little as six hours… the middle of the night, while SHIELD backup was just arriving at the facility, just starting to assess the corpses.

The snowfall would have obliterated their tracks, and Clint didn’t trust his beacon signal to make it out of the valley. And Loki knew that agents carried beacons, and that Clint would have activated his before heading out; Loki knew enough to find and destroy the beacon.

With the wound in his knee, he couldn’t drag Clint’s body anywhere useful before he collapsed, but his healing powers would likely have solved that problem well before he woke up again. Which meant that Loki could definitely hide his body before the agents caught up with them, and then he could escape, or even just go to ground until the search moved on.

As much as Clint wanted the bastard contained, he wouldn’t accomplish that by jumping the gun.

And so he waited.

When twenty minutes had passed, with no movement at all from the fallen prince, Clint finally returned his arrow to the quiver and laid his bow aside, getting out the restraints that SHIELD had proven (through some rather torturous experiments, so he’d heard) to best Loki’s superhuman strength. He pulled the unresistant arms behind Loki’s back, secured wrists to elbows, and then stopped to pull the arrow out of Loki’s knee before finishing the full hogtie.

Loki didn’t react.

After digging out the snow around Loki’s face, making sure that he could breathe, Clint put some distance between them, sat on a fallen log, and finally, _finally_ let himself relax.

With Loki’s words bouncing around in his brain:

_All the cuckoos in the nest. You missed it. SHIELD’s full of them, you’re serving them, and you don’t even see; I never thought you were blind. They’ve figured me out, and I can’t fight it off forever… they keep coming back. Dark hearts, many heads… they’re going to take me…_

Even after SHIELD had reclaimed their prisoner, and Clint had been sent on to his next assignment (rather quickly, but he was just grateful to have avoided another round with the damn shrinks), he couldn’t quit mulling it over.

During a video call with Natasha, he happened to mention it—Loki blathering on about cuckoos.

Natasha sat up straighter, eyes narrowed, and Clint felt a shiver of ice run down his back. What had he missed?

“The exact wording, Clint, as close as you can remember. What did he say?”

Clint swallowed, and sought the words again. “‘ _All the cuckoos in the nest… dark hearts, many heads._ ’”

“That’s all he said?”

“No, it was a whole conversation of crazy. Um… he told me that I’d missed something. That SHIELD was full of cuckoos, that I was blind… that I was serving them, and didn’t even know it. That they were going to take him, they’d figured him out and he couldn’t fight them off anymore.”

“Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Their young get raised by the unsuspecting parents.”

“I know _birds_ , Nat.”

“So he’s saying there’s someone in SHIELD who shouldn’t be there.”

“You’re going to take him seriously? He’s just trying to play with my head. _Again_.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s pretend, for a moment, that he’s trying to get a message out.”

“Tasha, we were alone in the woods. If he wanted to tell me something, he could’ve just said it.”

“And you probably would’ve ignored it, coming from him. Making it more cryptic means it’ll stick in your brain. I think he’s counting on your curiosity kicking in.”

“Well, great, he’s playing me again. Am I ever gonna be free from that guy?”

“While he’s still alive? Doubtful. But let’s focus on one thing at a time. We’ve done this before, Clint; figure out what it says.”

Clint sighed. “Okay, fine. ‘Cuckoos’ means someone who shouldn’t be there. ‘Full of cuckoos’ means a _lot_ of someones. Spies, sleeper agents, traitors. People who seem to be part of SHIELD but aren’t. And I haven’t noticed them yet, so I’m serving them. Loki thinks I should’ve noticed them by now.”

“And whoever they are, they want him.”

“‘ _They want me, they’re going to take me_ ,’” Clint quoted. “‘ _I’m just another stolen relic for everyone to make use of… they know enough, they’ve figured me out, and I can’t fight them off forever. Insects aren’t the only things that keep coming back._ ’”

“‘ _Dark hearts, many heads_ ,’” Natasha repeated thoughtfully.

“Oh god,” Clint blurted out, feeling the adrenaline rush through his system. “Nat, it’s—it’s HYDRA. Right? _Many heads_. Who else could that describe? Why would Loki even know about them, if they’re not—God, HYDRA’s still around, and they’ve infiltrated SHIELD.”

“That’s one possibility,” Nat allowed. “And it’s one we should act on, try to find out if it’s true. I’ll run it by Steve, and—”

“I’ve got to”—he swallowed—“I’m going to talk to Loki. See what else he might know. God, if he’s just yanking our chains—”

“If not, it’s a serious threat. Get a move on; I’ll make sure that Fury knows.”

“Stay safe,” Clint breathed, and ended the call.

Two days later, he was in Norway, looking at an empty cell, and finding no one at all who would admit that Loki had ever been there.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Alternate Ending:** Clint just sits on Loki's babbling -- maybe he mulls it over, maybe he ignores it, but he doesn't mention it to anyone. And then _The Winter Soldier_ happens, and Clint is like "Oh crap! He was actually trying to warn me!" and also "Damn that guy, warning me cryptically instead of straight out!" (and if he tells Natasha that, she might point out the same thing about how he wouldn't have done any better if Loki had said it straight out). But it all amounts to the same moment of finding an empty cell with no knowledge of where Loki's gone.
> 
> I'll have to add the Inspired By links later -- kinda late to look for them tonight, I'm tired and just want to see this posted -- but this was inspired by a handful of fics I've read where HYDRA get their hands on Loki. Generally where Loki was turned over to SHIELD, and nobody realized that SHIELD had been so infiltrated.
> 
> One in particular that I'm thinking of (thanks to Achika for pointing it out!) is _Something Shattered_ by Thoughtstream, which has Fury aware of how badly Loki is being tortured, but Fury just leaves Loki in the hands of what he thinks to be captive HYDRA agents, like let the fellow prisoners get their jollies, and Loki gets turned over to them _repeatedly_. It's horrendously dark and twisted and one of the darkest versions of Fury that I have ever read. Fury even comes by to check on Loki (after Tony has basically agreed to take Loki in) and moves his furniture into the hallway instead of his room, denies him any bedclothes, tells him basically to think of himself as an object instead of a person, and shoves him into a storage closet to wait for Tony to come home. And Loki's broken enough that it's easier to think he deserves it than to fight back, because fighting back would likely send him right back to the torture.
> 
> But anyway. Hope y'all had a Merry Christmas (or comparable holiday celebration). Hope to see another fic posted tomorrow; not sure if I'll be alternating POI with MCU, or if the Muse will lead in other directions, but I'd like to get a bunch of gift fics up before the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, at least. Cheers!


End file.
